The latest arrival, according to this author, is the blooming and ever enlarging portals that claim to provide online tutoring systems.

My last count of “online tutor” term search on Google showed 636,000 results and there appear to be more… I did not bother because the initial figures are good enough to prove my point.

Education is very much part of life today. Today’s jobs require education, technical acumen and very good communication skills to land a job in the shrinking market today for jobs. Further industry which provides the greatest source of employment, wants candidates to be multi-skilled, in other words, they must perform other tasks which are not related to their main job profile.

A farmer wants to send his children to school, because he does not want his children to go through the daily grind of working the fields; the household maid wants her children to get education for she does not want them to go through the same drudgery she has to. Any number of examples can be quoted as why education is booming.

Further Governments in developing countries, and even more surprisingly Governments in developed countries also want to encourage education. Why developed countries want their education system to improve is because various studies indicate that that the number of school and college drop-outs is alarmingly on the rise, and for the skilled jobs that are available in their countries are simply going empty, simply because the skilled people are not there.

Therefore, there is a demand for overseas hands, especially from countries like India, which have a good education system, and the skills required by the developed countries.

There is another factor, in developed countries, the population is graying: in other words, the number of elder people is more than the younger people. This population demographic is the cause of the earlier period of DINKS – a short form of Double Income No Kids. Thus there is an imbalance in the population. Witness the demand for nurses and the medical staff. Governments everywhere in the developed world are beginning to increasingly depend upon developing countries to provide the manpower simply because of this skill shortage.

Furthermore, it has been found that of the percentage of children going to school and college very few are really equipped with the knowledge or the skills to go further. It was in one of the reports put out by one of the organisations of the United Nations.

Where there is a threat, there is an opportunity. Online tutoring is one such example. Since schooling was not enough to provide the required skills to the students, tuitions have long been resorted to by many parents, developing and developed countries alike, because they would like to see their children are well educated, and indeed competitive enough to come first in their class, if not in the whole school!

But where are the teachers for the tuitions? In developed world, there is a shortage of teachers – either because it does not pay enough, or it does not provide competitive salaries as other fields. Thus, a teacher taking tuition in a developed country would charge anywhere between $40 and $60 for an hour! This is beyond the reach of many parents, even if both of them are earning. The parents themselves do not have the time to coach their own children, given the hectic lifestyle.

Online tutoring took the opportunity with both hands. As mentioned before, there are so many websites that it is a like an overcrowded bazaar. To be fair, most of the websites provide specialized subjects, while others cover the whole gamut of education right from K1 to K12, and of course in collegiate studies, right from basics to even writing complete reports. The last is a threat as far as this author is concerned. Submitting ghost written homework does not help the student. Instead it makes that student LAZY, yes lazy in capitals. Outsourcing one’s home work is certainly not going to help the student. Rather if the student learnt how to write, where to look, and how to compile his notes would certainly be a better route.

If this writer is asked to choose a good site, then India would certainly be recommended. India has a large pool of highly trained people, education is considered a goal, teachers and professors are regarded very highly, English is the most used language here, and as most people know, more and more Indians and persons of Indian descent are now at the helm of affairs of the Fortune 500 companies. Obviously, this wealth of human capital could not have come if they did not have strong educational values, and emphasis on education.

More, most Indians after their initial education in India tend to acquire further degrees or add to their education by taking courses in other countries particularly the US, the UK. Today, there is a growing competition between various overseas educational communities to entice Indian students, because of the factors mentioned above.

So, while looking for online tutoring, look for a source which is based in India, but do use precautions while signing up for one of them. www.transwebtutors.com is one site, this tutor looked to check what they were offering and that is how this article came to be written. The tutor there showed great expertise and I knew it, so no surprise. However what amazed me was how the hell did he knew US curricula so well. The tutor asked me about my school (as I was pretending a kid) and to my surprise he already knew which book was being followed there. I was impressed. And now I have a solution for my students who need some extra tutoring hours.